Preview of the Virginia Festival of the Book, March 20-22, 2026

Kalela Williams directs the Virginia Humanities' Virginia Center for the Book, which includes the Virginia Festival of the Book and other programs and projects throughout the year. In addition to this role, she has served in directorships and other leadership capacities for the Philadelphia organization Mighty Writers; the Free Library of Philadelphia, including their One Book, One Philadelphia program; and James Madison University’s Furious Flower Poetry Center. Her debut novel, the YA coming-of-age story Tangleroot, was named an Indie Next pick and was chosen as one of Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2024.

At some point recently, I found myself listening to recordings of William Faulkner, taken during the time he served as writer-in-residence at UVA from 1957-1958. It was the first time I heard his voice, and thus of course the first time I heard him say “Yoknapatawpha,” the fictional county in so many of his works. It’s an old word, he said, pulled from the Muskogean language spoken by the Chickasaw. In a clip we can hear today at Faulkner at Virginia: An Audio Archive, the writer explains that it means “water flows slow through flat land.” His southern drawl too, is a creek. It is deep, and it flows melodically with some stops, like eddies swirling around stones: with words like “woman” pronounced “whoman” and “believe” like “bleeve.” When he told a student, “a writer writes from his experience, his—his background,” I took him to say “backbone.”  

Maybe because I’m a Southerner, though growing up in Georgia, not Mississippi—and in a big city, at that—but I was drawn to Faulkner in high school. I had hoped his work could be a portend for the fictional world I wanted to create, where a place is also a character, one in which secrets lurk and hide. His stories took residence within me, and so too did both a fascination and opposition with the gods-will-be-done, now-I-can-get-them-teeth folk of the world. I was learning what legends of 11th graders before me found—a deep connection to an author’s work, one that pushed past my heart and reached somewhere more structural within me. Something shifted. I rediscovered that I wanted to write something that matters to me. Something foundational, and something I wanted to share. 

Isn’t that what authors do? This weekend, more than 100 authors from around the United States and as far as the UK are joining us in Charlottesville for the 2026 Virginia Festival of the Book, now in its 33rd year. The centerpiece is the idea of Revolutions, but we are looking at this concept broadly. 

A revolution might be war, for sure, but it is also in shifts in perspective, in disruption of norms, in cycles and pivot points and even in paradoxes. We are studying paradoxical people, with books like Being Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, by Andrew Burstein: and other household names like Amelia Earhart in Laurie Gwen Shapiro’s The Aviator and the Showman. But we’re turning to the relatively unknown, too, like Earhart’s recklessly-ambitious (some might say shameless) husband, George Putnam; like Claire McCardell, a fashion designer who brought women pockets, ballet flats, and mix and match separates, items considered essential now but “crazy” during her time. We'll see an actual example of one of her garments, as well as other historic pieces courtesy of the Historic Clothing Collection of UVA’s Department of Drama.  

We are reading old works, too. George A. Newman, the son of enslaved Virginians, penned a manuscript more than 150 years ago, a fascinating “white life” novel, one with the exciting, melodramatic conventions of its time (think scandal and attempted murder: the novel IS called A Miserable Revenge). We’ll hear a staged reading of this work directed by UVA’s Leslie Scott-Jones. We’ll also see the fascinating words from the past in Cipher: Decoding My Ancestor’s Scandalous Secrets play out in readings from the author and even shadow puppetry.  

Contemporary novels like Princess Joy L. Perry’s devastating This Here is Love, and A. Natasha Joukovsky’s imaginative Medium Rare shine, as does poetry in books like Be Easy by Adrian Matejka, editor of Poetry Magazine, and Death Does Not End at the Sea by Furious Flower Poetry Center’s Gbenga Adesina. Memoir speaks eloquently in Man Made: Searching for Dads, Daddies, Father Figures, and Fatherhood by Steve Majors, and elegiacally in Larks by Han VanderHart.  

When I look at the slate of books this year, I wonder if how I heard William Faulkner’s words: “a writer writes from his backbone,” is just as true. When authors write what matters, they often write books that draw us in, that keep us curious, that allow us into another person’s mind or into another world altogether. They write more deeply than what touches our hearts, into the very thing that holds us up and keeps us standing.